Friday, January 13, 2012

Brendan M. Gillen on Drexciya

There is a revealing interview with Brendan M. Gillen of Ectomorph about Drexciya here which includes memories like, “After I received a promo of the first Drexciya on Submerge, I called Mike Banks to give him feedback, and ask if I could have them down for an interview on my then radio show “Crush Collision.” He told me he really appreciated the positive feedback but warned me that they were crazy and would talk about “fucking their mom and Madonna’s tits.” I thought that sounded great, funnier than Slayer’s image. When they eventually came down for an interview, we ran James’ voice through some processing, and Gerald showed up with his face painted half white, half black like that episode on the original Star Trek.One time I went to visit the Drexciyan studio on the east side of Detroit, and when I walked into the basement I was greeted by Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” at full volume. James, who had a poster of a young Malcom X behind him was wearing a paperclip chain hanging from his glasses, asked me if I was surprised. I was like “No, ‘Hydro Cubes,’ the first EP, so much heavy riffing.” Despite the fact that they were best defined by their funk influences combining with the synthesizer music of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, especially Juan Atkins’ vision, I really loved how rock they were.”Great video of Brendan talking about history of Detroit techno.

There is now an official video documenting Dopplereffekt’s Neutrino show in Liverpool from September 2011. It includes snippets of lectures and music.http://vimeo.com/neutrinoprogramm

There is a new Victoria Lukas mix up here and Zerkalo will be playing live at Raumd in Basel, Switzerland on 28th of Jan 2012. See local press for details.